California is sliding slowly into the abyss. It’s not enough that 9,000 companies have packed up and moved to more tax-friendly states. The Bay Area is so expensive that few can afford to live there. Progressives run the place like their own personal slot machine.

The California Air Resources Board has issued regulations to cut the state’s greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, but the board is getting worried about their climate agenda. It could all be ruined by natural phenomena.They’ve gone after the oil producers, the manufacturers and now they are going after the cows.

It’s methane, which”according to the board is a ‘short-lived climate pollutant with an outsized impact on climate change in the near term.” ” “Cow manure and ‘enteric fermentation’ (flatulence) account for half of the state’s methane emissions.”

“If dairy farms in California were to manage manure in a way to further reduce methane emissions,” the board explains, “a gallon of California milk might be the least GHG intensive in the world.” And the most expensive. Many California dairy farms have already been converted into nut farms, which are more economical amid the state’s high regulatory costs.

The board suggests that dairy farms purchase technology to capture methane and then sell the biogas to consumers. Yet the regulators acknowledge that most ideas involve environmental trade-offs and are not cost-effective without substantial government subsidies and regulatory credits that can be sold to fossil-fuel producers….

Other brainstorms include breeding animals that belch less and testing “gut microbial interventions”—though no doubt Democrats will want to see if the anti-genetic-modification activists object. This all may be too much information for readers, but it shows that in their attempt to impose their climate religion there is no corner of the economy or life that progressives won’t try to control.

They don’t give up. They believe what they want to believe, and are sure that anything else is a lie and shouls probably be prosecuted. The climate of the earth over the past century has warmed by approximately 7 tenths of a degree Centigrade. Carbon dioxide, which they are desperately trying to get rid of, is fertilizer for plants and is greening the world, and helping to feed a hungry planet. California has managed its water resources so poorly that the great Central Valley, the breadbasket of the world, has turned into a dust bowl as they attempt to save the Delta smelt, a tiny bait fish that may or may not be endangered.

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You know, every time I hear about the “endangered” delta smelt, I find myself thinking back to the mid-70’s, when another “endangered” fish almost put a stop to development.

You may not remember it, but once upon a time there was a little bitty fish called the snail darter, and according to the environmentalist crowd, it only existed in a section of the Little Tennessee River near a town called Lenoir City, where the Little Tennessee flowed into the Tennessee River. This discovery was important, because it allowed an environmental group to get an injunction, under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act, to stop the construction of a flood control dam that was designed to divert the Little Tennessee to empty into the Tennessee upstream from the Fort Loudoun Dam, a TVA hydroelectric dam. Tellico Dam was over 90% complete when they were forced to stop working on it because of a tiny bait fish that no one had ever heard of before (it was remarkable how unremarkable the snail darter actually was). Any of this sound at all familiar?

In ’78, Congress passed a waiver to the Endangered Species Act that allowed the completion of Tellico Dam, and in 1979 the gates were closed and the Tellico Reservoir was formed, creating a popular lake and, because of the way the Little Tennessee was diverted, created a slightly more than 20% increase in power production at Fort Loudoun.

And the snail darter? Well, it seems this little fish survived the completion of Tellico Dam. It can still be found in the Little Tennessee. And in a strange defiance of the environmentalist crowd, who claimed that the snail darter would become extinct and thereby upset the food chain of the entire Tennessee Valley, the snail darter (actually a small species of river perch) can be found in many parts of the Little Tennessee, the Tennessee, the Hiwassee, the Ocoee, all the way down to Chickamauga Creek in Chattanooga. Variations have been found as far away as the Clinch River, Cherokee Lake on the Holston River, and in sections of the French Broad River near Sevierville. The claims that this is because it was “transplanted” notwithstanding, local fisherman claim that this fish has been around various parts of the eastern Tennessee Valley since at least before the creation of the TVA.

Something tells me that in the not too distant future, we’re going to hear about (“strange” to “miraculous”) sightings of the delta smelt in the Sacramento, Kern, Truckee, and Colorado Rivers.

I do remember the snail darter. When the enviros see a project that they don’t like, which seems to be most of them, they are out with magnifying glasses trying to find something “endangered.” Endangered species should preferably be cute, like harp seals, or polar bear cubs. (I have written way too many posts about the false conception that polar Bears are endangered). The whole “endangered” thing is hogwash — if there are none on this side of the mountain, are there some on the other? A fair number of supposedly extinct species have been rediscovered. I’ve written about that too. There was a particular herd of caribou that they were sure had all perished, but they had just moved to a new locale.

The delta smelt is being out competed by an alien introduced Japanese Smelt. At the time of the introduction, they were believed to be the same species. Now we can tell them apart (though they can’t, so they interbreed…)

I didn’t know that. So the Japanese version will quickly wipe out the smelt native to the Delta, and the extinction of the native variety will mean nothing to the environment or is there a butterfly effect? On the other hand, California has been getting most things wrong ever since they thought it would be a good idea to build an immense sprawl of a city in the Los Angeles Basin. And they haven’t discontinued the railroad yet, either.